In the last day of GECCO, there was little in terms of the conference itself. First we had the GECCO business meeting. A number of CFP were announced, including the CFP for GECCO 2010, in Portland, Oregon. It was also said that there was a plan to alternate GECCO between north america and Europe from them on – I hope it works, I think it would be nice. After that, the winners of the different competitions and awards were announced – no big surprises.
After the business meeting we had a plenary talk from professor J. Holland, who talked about the development of evolutionary computation in the past and present, tying it with the idea of complex systems. It reminded me how nice it is to be in a field where you can still hear talks from its pioneers.
After Prof. Holland’s talk, I attended to one of the Late Breaking Papers sessions, to see the work of Nunes that I mentioned in the previous post. It was interesting, and seemed to fit well with the work that other people in my lab are doing for finance.
GECCO was over, and then I went for lunch with many of the people I were hanging with in the conference. Supposedly, there was a “Conference Lunch”, in a restaurant in Chinatown, but when we got there we could see no one from GECCO – just shrimps. Shrimps. That chinese restaurant, for some reason, had 90% of its dishes composed of shrimps – fried shrimp, boiled shrimp, raw shrimp, yakisoba with shrimp, shrimp pie… some people in our group were getting quite sick of it, but I was loving! :-)
After the lunch, Verena, who was with us, said she was going Geocaching – and having heard about it before, I invited myself to accompany her, out of curiosity. I must say it was one of the coolest things I have done in a while. The idea of Geocaching is that people hide small caches in out of the way locations, or in the city, and then publish GPS coordinates for those caches. You get those coordinates and try to find them. When you do, you can sign a log book, and see what other people have left in the same cache.
Sounds simple enough, but for me the most amazing part of the experience was that 1- it took you to places you would never otherwise see in a town – It seems to me a great thing to do when you are in a place you have never been before (like the conference) 2- it also makes you see places you see every day in a very different way – something is hidden somewhere you pass by every day. Verena was quite a pro at it already, and in about 8 hour walking, we found almost a dozen caches in Mount Royal and the old town. We walked a total of almost 15 km! Quite an excercise too!
And that ended my short trip to Montreal :-) It was a good chance to make contacts with new people, re-establish old ones, see new research, and even do quite a bit of tourism.